title: To Dash or to Dawdle: Verb-Associated Speed of Motion Influences Eye Movements during Spoken Sentence Comprehension.
abstract: In describing motion events verbs of manner provide information about the speed of agents or objects in those events. We used eye tracking to investigate how inferences about this verb-associated speed of motion would influence the time course of attention to a visual scene that matched an event described in language. Eye movements were recorded as participants heard spoken sentences with verbs that implied a fast ("dash") or slow ("dawdle") movement of an agent towards a goal. These sentences were heard whilst participants concurrently looked at scenes depicting the agent and a path which led to the goal object. Our results indicate a mapping of events onto the visual scene consistent with participants mentally simulating the movement of the agent along the path towards the goal: when the verb implies a slow manner of motion, participants look more often and longer along the path to the goal; when the verb implies a fast manner of motion, participants tend to look earlier at the goal and less on the path. These results reveal that event comprehension in the presence of a visual world involves establishing and dynamically updating the locations of entities in response to linguistic descriptions of events.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Dundee, Dundee, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Shane
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lindsay
authors.forename: Christoph
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Scheepers
authors.forename: Yuki
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Kamide
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007803:Language Arts; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male